Tom Campbell: The GOP candidate for 2016

The Republican candidate for president in 2016 will be pro-life, oppose same sex-marriage, oppose drug legalization of any kind, and support religious exemptions to federal laws as the Supreme Court found in the Hobby Lobby decision. This is true of John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Mike Pence and any other candidate reasonably under consideration.

The Democratic candidate will be pro-choice, pro-marriage equality, and opposed to religious exemptions to generally applicable laws. This is true for Hilary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and any other Democrat likely to run. For the Republican to win, however, the candidate will have to engage in a minuet, in which expressed views will be at odds with relative lack of emphasis upon them. For the Democrat, politics will not require such delicacy. The Republican’s hopes to win will turn on avoiding making the social issues salient. The Democrat’s hopes rest on the opposite.

The reason is that there is a real division within Republican ranks, but not Democratic ranks, on social issues. The way this has been dealt with in the past is for a Republican candidate to announce a socially conservative position, and then ignore what he said. President Reagan ran as a pro-life candidate. He appointed three U.S. Supreme Court Justices: two of them upheld Roe v. Wade. Were Anthony Kennedy and Sandra Day O’Connor surprise disappointments to President Reagan? Or did President Reagan really not care to vet his candidates very closely on that issue? President Reagan telephoned his support to the annual gathering in Washington to protest that Supreme Court decision; his schedule was never free enough for him to show up in person. He had expanded abortion rights in California as governor. He picked George H.W. Bush as his running mate, who, as a congressman, had been chairman of the family planning caucus. When George H.W. Bush became president, he had two Supreme Court picks: they turned out to be one pro-choice, one pro-life.

We can expect a successful Republican presidential candidate to announce a position just socially conservative enough to reassure the base, but not to dwell on it at risk of alienating independent minded, and especially young voters. When elected, hoping for re-election, such a Republican would do next to nothing to reverse these social policies. Republicans appear to tolerate this degree of duplicity. Social conservatives appear satisfied with promises, social moderates or libertarians appear reassured by relative lack of emphasis, followed by inaction, on the social agenda.

Democrats have a different approach. They have seemingly silenced dissent within their ranks on abortion, gay marriage and religious exemptions to general laws.

Orthodoxy has eliminated the need for duplicity. The Democratic candidate will go into the general election with a real emphasis on the social issues, especially on abortion rights and gay marriage, where they hold a popular position. Hilary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden and any other reasonably likely Democratic candidate will carry the same message from their base in the primary to their action in office, if elected.

The Democratic center is thus more likely to hold. The Republican coalition has a risk of rupture, should libertarian-minded Republicans not be willing to support yet another national candidate who publicly disagrees with deeply cherished beliefs. Some libertarian-leaning Republicans could just not vote; others might vote for the Libertarian candidate. The socially moderate Republican voter has a negative power: to destroy the socially conservative Republican candidate’s chances.

Whether or not enough of them will do so in 2016 has a lot to do with the body language and subtlety with which the socially conservative Republican presidential candidate plays down his social positions. This is exactly what happened in the Virginia governor’s race in 2013. The Republican candidate, Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, lost by 2.6 percent, but the Libertarian candidate took 6.5 percent, and the result was a Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe. Attorney General Cuccinelli trumpeted his social conservatism. A successful Republican presidential candidate will not.

The social conservatives hold a veto in the Republican presidential primaries: so the socially moderate or libertarian Republican cannot hope for a candidate, nationwide, who publicly espouses her or his views. The most such a voter can hope for is a Ronald Reagan. Maybe the prospect of another such president will be enough to cause both sides of the Republican party to live with schizophrenia a little longer.

Tom Campbell is dean of the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University. He served five terms in the U.S. Congress, and ran for U.S. Senate as a moderate Republican. These views are his own.

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